1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to radio frequency (RF) signal reception, and more particularly to reception and separation of cochannel frequency modulated (FM) signals.
2. Description of the Related Art
Cochannel signal interference occurs when two or more signals are received at the same time over the same frequency range or band. For example, cochannel signal interference may be encountered by a receiver that is receiving two or more signals transmitted at the same frequency and at the same time by two or more separate transmitters. In such a case, data (e.g., voice data, text data, etc.) contained in any one of the interfering cochannel signals cannot be accessed or processed further without first separating the given signal from the other signals to allow demodulation or other further signal processing. This situation occurs frequently with airborne receivers. Even signals with carefully planned frequency re-use (such as FM radio stations), often result in co-channel interference for airborne receivers due to the much longer line-of-sight. In the case of analog FM, cochannel signal interference can result in the inability of a conventional FM receiver to copy one or more signals, typically the weaker signal/s.
In the past, beamforming and interference cancellation techniques such as spatial interference cancellation have been employed for purposes of cochannel signal separation. These techniques employ multiple sensors to separate a given signal of interest by canceling or nulling out other cochannel signals from the signal of interest. For example, in the case of beamforming, multiple spatially separated antennas connected to multiple phase-coherent receivers or multi-channel coherent tuner are used. The signals from the spatially separated antennas are combined in such a way as to emphasize the contribution of one signal over the others, allowing the use of a conventional (single-signal) demodulator at the beamformer output. This technique makes use of spatial structure.
However, such past approaches require spatial separation of sources in addition to expensive coherent multi-channel tuners having a number of channels corresponding to a number of sensors that is equal to or greater than the number of cochannel signals. When the number of signals exceeds the number of sensors, the signal environment may be characterized as overloaded. Performance of traditional beamforming and interference cancellation techniques typically fails or degrades in such an overloaded signal environment.
Parallel Interference Cancellation (“PIC”) and Serial Interference Cancellation (“SIC”) are types of algorithms typically used for jointly estimating data bits for multi-user spread-spectrum CDMA signals. In such an application, there are usually a large number of co-channel signals, and even though the signal is designed with co-channel operation in mind, advanced techniques are sometimes used to provide better performance. These techniques are referred to as Multi-User Detection (“MUD”) algorithms. PIC is one of the most popular types of MUD algorithms, due to its ability to cope with the long code problem, which refers to situations where the spreading code spans more than a single data symbol.